Domino 8.5.3 on Windows 2003 (Physical)
Test Configuration
Owner: Jeremy Flynn
Configuration name: SVTREL14
Date of issue: 14th September 2011
Product version: 8.5.3
Document Version: 0.1 draft
1
Overview
The IBM System Verification Test (SVT) objective is to execute a set of test scenarios against a test configuration that contains the key requirements and components that will create a load in a Domino domain consisting of both 64 bit and 32 bit Domino running on two 64 bit Windows Server 2003 machines.
This testing used test scripts currently used by the Domino System Test team.
One's perception of system quality is governed under the statement of overall system reliability. A widely accepted definition of software reliability is the probability that a computer system performs its destined purpose without failure over a specified time period within a particular execution environment. This execution environment is known formally as the operational profile, which is defined in terms of sets of possible input values together with their probabilities of occurrence. An operational profile is used to drive a portion of the system testing. Software reliability modelling is therefore applied to data gathered during this phase of testing and then used to predict subsequent failure behaviour during actual system operations
A reliability test is one that focuses on the extent to which the feature or system will provide the intended function without failing. The goal of all types of testing is the improvement of the reliability program with specific statements about reliability specific tests. Reliability is the impact of failures, malfunctions, errors and other defect related problems encountered by customers. Reliability is a measure of the continuous delivery of the correct service (and, the time to failure).
SVT's purpose of running Reliability tests was to ascertain the following:
· Data population for all parts of the infrastructure to force set limits to be achieved and passed
· Running sustained reliability scripts at >100% maximum capacity. Assessing :
· Breakpoints
· System stability pre and post breakpoint
· Serviceability
· Forcing spikes and anti-spikes in usage patterns
· Exposing NRPC, and DWA services to 110% of their maximum load
· Flushing out the DB Table spaces to their maximum, proving the maximum, proving ability to recover/get back to a good place when the maximum limits have been exceeded
· Proving serviceability errors and warnings when thresholds are hit
2
Configuration diagram for SPNEGO/Siteminder 6.0 SP5 on Windows 2003 on Physical HW
The Windows 2003 on Physical HW configuration the domino system test team used, utilised two Windows Server 2003 64 bit machines, each running 1 DPAR. Each Windows server had a different version of Domino code, with one running 64 bit and the other running 32 bit. The Windows 2003 machines are shown in the server.load Mail Cluster on the left of the diagram below.
The environment consists of two Windows 64 bit machines with a single Domino Partition on each. Each DPAR will host 1,500 registered users and will run a number of active users, dependant on the load being applied.
These two clustered mail servers are connected to a Hub Server which also serves as the Hub Server for two more mail servers in the SPNEGO/Siteminder config. This wider config comprises Siteminder, Portal, Quikr and Connections running Sametime with a DB2 backend. Further details are outside the scope of this document.
It is generally recommended to use a separate file system for Transaction Logging. This test had transaction logging set to Linear mode and approx 95% of the available space on the file system was allocated to the .TXN log files.
The design task was run prior to the start of the test to upgrade the templates. The update task runs for the entire period of the test (until the server is brought down).
Details of System under Test (SUT)
System | IBM 7979 - xSeries 3650 |
Processor | Xeon 3.4 GHz
2 CPUs per domino partitions
|
Memory | 8GB |
Model of Machine | IBM 7979 - xSeries 3650 |
Disk Drive | 6 x 146.8 GB 15K Hard Drives, connected to SAN (32bit Domino)
and
4 x 146.8 GB 15K Hard Drives + 500 GB SAN (64bit Domino)
|
Operating System | Windows Server 2003 (x64) |
Domino Server | Domino 8.5.3 Production Build for Windows (32bit and 64bit) |
Table 1
Table 1 shows the resources available in the physical environment.
2.1 Evaluation Criteria
The performance of Domino 8.5.3 is evaluated under the following criteria:
· Server CPU: The overall CPU of the server will be monitored over the course of the experiment. The aim is for the server CPU not to go above 75% over the course of the experiment allowing the server to function appropriately. It is acceptable for the CPU to occasionally spike at this level for a short period of time, but it must return to a lower level. High CPU results from the server being stressed due to processes running such as compact, fixup or replication or from user load or any other third party programs.
· Domino Processes CPU: The previous metric monitors the overall CPU of the server, however, the CPU consumption of Domino specific processes will also be monitored individually. In this manner the CPU consumption of Domino specific processes may be evaluated.
· Server Memory: The server memory metric represents the amount of physical memory available on the server. If the available memory becomes low the server performance could be compromised.
· Server Disk I/O: The disk is a source of contention when a server is under load and performing a high number of read and write operations. The disk queue length is measured to determine if the disk I/O operations are resulting in a bottleneck for the system performance.
· Network I/O: These metrics monitor the network utilization to ensure the bandwidth consumption is acceptable and that the network is not overloaded.
· Response Times from the End-user Perspective: The server response times for user actions represent how long a single user must wait for a given transaction to complete. This metric captures the user experience of the application with the server. At times, response times will be longer when a server is under load. When response times increase over an extended period, or persist at high levels (e.g. when a database or view takes longer than 30 seconds to open), they indicate that performance indicators are being hit and detailed analysis must be performed to determine the source of the slowdown and seek remediation.
· Open Session Response Times: In addition to monitoring the individual action response times, the Open session response times will also be evaluated in order to ensure the server remains responsive over the course of the experiment.
2.2
Tools
In order to simulate user activity and capture the evaluation metrics discussed in section 2.1 a number of tools must be used:
·
server.load: server.load is a capacity-planning tool that is used to run a variety of different loads against a targeted Domino server.
· Domino showstats data: The Domino showstats captures important server metrics. A server.load client driver may be used to execute the showstats console command at regular intervals for each server in the configuration and will provide Domino-specific data. The resulting data is logged in a text file and may be graphed for analysis.
· Open session: The Open session tool measures mail file request/response times. It will open a view of a mail database at a set time interval and record the response time in milliseconds. As a result, a server slow down may be identified by analyzing the resulting response times.
· Windows Performance Monitor: This is used to graph the CPU Usage, Disk IOP Utilization and Lan Utilization during the 7 day run.
· Log Correlation Tool: a run-time correlation tool was used over the 7 day duration of the test which monitors, collects, adapts, filters and stores events from the system. The tool identifies known errors and symptoms and presents them in the context of other events. Features of the tool include time drift compensation, time zone identification, event adaptation, scope for adapter add-ons, event correlation, application and run grouping, filtering and tagging and also symptom matching to aid problem resolution.
2.3
Evaluation Process
The server.load tool was used to place load on the Domino server. In order to simulate realistic load on the Domino server a total of 8 client drivers running server.load were used.
Within the different test cycles, loads were applied to the configuration to simulate user activity. During each cycle 1,000 mail users were directed at each DPAR along with a second ‘web’ based load of 500 DWA users.
In order to isolate the performance of the Domino server under load from a single user perspective for standard Notes mail, a client driver will execute a “single user” open session script.
The results represent a single user experience of how the application will perform at busy times of the day when the server is heavily loaded.
Mailfiles, Domino data and DAOS NLO's are stored on SAN Storage for these tests.
2.4
Scenario: Online Mode
The scenario evaluates the performance of Lotus Notes Clients in online mode. Online mode means that the user mail files are stored and maintained on the Domino server. Every time a user performs an action the request is sent to the server and the mail file is modified and updated on the server side.
Table 2 shows the action workload of the built in N85Mail script with modifications to the attachment size. The script reflects the workload that is expected of a single user over the course of a day:
N85Mail Script with attachment size modification |
Workload Actions | Action Count per hour per user current script | Action Count per 24 hour per user current script |
Refresh inbox | 4 | 96 |
Read Message | 20 | 480 |
Reply to all | 2 | 48 |
Send Message to one recipient | 4 | 96 |
Send Message to three recipient | 2 | 48 |
Create appointment | 4 | 96 |
Send Invitation | 4 | 96 |
Send RSVP | 4 | 96 |
Move to folder | 4 | 96 |
New Mail poll | 4 | 96 |
Delete two documents | 4 | 96 |
Total Messages sent | 16 | 384 |
Total Transactions | 52 | 1248 |
Table 2
The resulting mail distribution is shown in table 3:
Message Distribution in N85 Mail Script |
Message size distribution | Percent of messages sent | Attachment size ( if any ) |
0 < size <= 1k | 5.9% | N/A |
1k < size <= 10k | 66% | N/A |
10k < size <= 100k | 25.0% | 50 KB |
100k < size <= 1mb | 2.8% | N/A |
1mb < size <= 10mb | .3% | 10 MB |
|
Table 3
Table 4 shows the action workload of the built in N85DWA script with modifications to the attachment size. The script has been heavy modified to load attachments into DAOS, so is not really indicative of standard users activity:
N85DWA Script with attachment size modification |
Workload Actions | Action Count per hour per user current script | Action Count per 24 hour per user current script |
Refresh inbox | 4 | 96 |
Read Message | 20 | 480 |
Reply to one message | 4 | 96 |
Send Message to one recipient | 4 | 96 |
Send Message to three recipient | 4 | 96 |
Create appointment | 4 | 96 |
Send Invitation | 4 | 96 |
Send RSVP | 4 | 96 |
Move to folder | 4 | 96 |
New Mail poll | 12 | 288 |
Delete two documents | 4 | 96 |
Total Messages sent | 20 | 480 |
Total Transactions | 68 | 1632 |
Table 4
The resulting mail distribution is shown in table 5:
Message Distribution in N85 DWA Script |
Message Body size distribution | Percent of messages sent | Attachment size ( if any ) |
64 KB | 70% | 64 KB |
64 KB | 15% | 12 KB |
12 KB | 6% | 64 KB |
64 KB | 5% | 584 KB |
640 KB | 2% | 64 MB |
12 KB | 2% | 584 KB |
|
Table 5
3 Test drivers
The workload is generated by 9 “driver” workstations:
· Driver1 - 250 DWA users
· Driver2 - 250 DWA users
· Driver3 - 250 DWA users
· Driver4 - 250 DWA users
· Driver5 - 500 Mail users
· Driver6 - 500 Mail users
· Driver7 - 500 Mail users
· Driver8 - 500 Mail users
· Driver9 - used for a Lotus Notes Administration client and for running statistics collection and monitoring delays in opening databases routinely on each Domino partitioned server.
4
Conclusion and Summary
The test results demonstrate that the Windows Server 2003 64 bit machine configured as described in this report was able to support up to 1500 concurrent, active Notes 8.5.3 users per Domino Server with an average response time below 2 seconds.
The addition of other application workloads will affect the number of users supported as well as the response time.
Achieving optimum performance in a customer environment is highly dependent upon selecting adequate processor power, memory and disk storage as well as balancing the configuration of that hardware and appropriately tuning the operating system and Domino software.
5 Configuration settings
Server Notes.ini
The following notes.ini variable was added to each of the Domino Servers:
DAOSDeferredDeleteInterval=30 (This deletion of NLO files is known as “pruning” and occurs at the specified “Deferred Deletion Interval.”)
DAOSBasePath=DAOS (DAOS base path, if you leave it DAOS, and your data directory is C:\Lotus\Domino\Data, the full path to the repository would be C:\Lotus\Domino\Data\DAOS)
DAOSMinObjSize=1096 (the minimum size setting for an attachment to make use of DAOS is 1096 bytes.)
DAOSEnable=1 (Enabling DAOS)
DAOS_CATALOG_VERSION=3 (DAOS Catalog version to be set 3)
DAOSCatalogState=1 (state of the DAOS catalog)
CREATE_R85_DATABASES=1 (to enable ODS 51 as the default)
CREATE_R85_LOG=1 (to enable the creation of Transaction Logs in 85 format)